


Three Murders, Two Wars and a Wedding

by alephthirteen



Series: And Now for Something Completely Different [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: "In Space, Aliens, All species have at least ONE super awesome found family, Bis - Freeform, F/F, F/M, Humans, Lesbians, Murder Mystery, No One Can Hear You Homophobes", Other, Robots, Some aliens do not look like humans but are still sexy, Some aliens look like humans and are sexy, Space Opera, Straights, Telepathy, That's how they survived the dark ages, alien cultures, gays, military sci-fi, mind powers, tw: childhood trauma, tw: homophobic slurs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:14:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21643510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: I was thinking of doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) but I missed November so I'm doing DeReWriMo (December Rewriting Month) where I hope to get a rough draft of more than 60,000 words together as part of a series of novel-length works.  It will be a rewrite of the first book-length work that I wrote, pulling in elements of others I wrote later.  It's not fanfic but it is a space opera with murder mystery elements within.  Both were written several years ago and I've improved a lot but they still have some gems.Join me for spaceships, shakedowns in mafia strip clubs, eldritch aliens, space tigers, space rhinos, space wasps, living starships with crushes and lots of personal issues to process!The heroes will include:* An ex-cop and her space-empress wife.* A shy diplomatic officer and her furry, apex-predator girlfriend.* An onboard AI and her crush, a machine-god disembodied intelligence.* A ranchhand turned space marine and his badass politician girlfriend.* A pair of galaxy-ravaging killing machines in love and raising their babies.Featuring:* Telepathic sex* Police procedural bits* Walking on the MOON* Adorable xenomorph teenagers
Series: And Now for Something Completely Different [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560271
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	1. Birthdays (Ari)

**The Tilsi Homeworld of Myreli (45,000 LY from Earth)**

**Eastern Arm, Milky Way Galaxy**

**House Morinsi Estates**

**December 11th, 2032**

As I draw the pencil across this--what did Claire call it?--this sheet of _whatever,_ I understand the appeal. Every glyph I scratch out is a scrape of mineral on tree pulp, leaving wreckage in the form of little black crumbs. It's _visceral_ in a way a datapad is definitely not. Especially so when I was sketching her last night. She said it was a re-enactment from some old vid from Earth, something about a ship that sank, killing thousands.

As if I cared why!

Claire was bare and blushing and one of the priciest jewels in the galaxy rested on her freckled breast. She is my queen and in that moment, she looked it.

The tracking tag felt like a boulder in my pocket all night. So long as I kept the jewel close -- extremely close -- it wouldn't trigger the alarm. 

"Paper," I realize, smacking the sheet with the back of my hand. "She called it paper!"

"Yes, Maiden. She did, I believe."

I flick my eyes over to the attendant in the corner.

"I'm fine, Arox. Go away, please."

He shakes his head.

"Your mother's orders."

I groan.

"You are not part of the house guard, Arox, nor are you a subject kinsman. You are a steward, a _vy'koshing_ incredible steward, but a steward. Mother can no more 'order' you to stand there than she can order me to open my guts with a foil's blade."

"My oath," he stammers.

"Arox, my oldest friend...your oath was just words. Oaths like that were outlawed eons ago. Your _contract,_ " I remind him. "Is to be well compensated for domestic and organizational services to the house and it's members and our happiness. Right now, I will be happier with only my thoughts. Mother..."

I feel a grin tugging on my lips.

"Mother can learn to live with disappointment."

Arox shrugs.

"If you're willing to anger her, you'll make a fine Lady one day. Good day, Maiden.."

He bows and leaves.

I launch myself from the bed and snag the bag tucked into my closet.

It's my lover's birthday. I'm not going to spend it imprisoned in a tower.

I just have to hope Treyla isn't on guard duty...she taught me everything I know.

Now that I think on it, if Kayali is on patrol, I'm equally doomed. I've walked into three different trees on these grounds at the sight of her bare arms during sparring sessions.

Checking my grip on the climbing gloves, I cinch the pack's straps down tight. I tap in the override code from the mainframe. The one I stole from the pocket a wide-eyed, trembling cadet while my tongue kept her attention elsewhere. 

Mothers Above, she tasted divine.

Nothing like Claire, though.

The cadet's hands were on my head the whole time, her thoughts nipping at mine, begging entrance into my mind. She was unused to the pure physicality of sex as humans practice it, something I was equally unprepared for when I met Claire. 

I could have thrown the doors of Claire's mind open, dashed inside and plucked her like an instrument. The first night, I tried. She snatched my hands from her temples and moved them to her breasts, denying me. Then her thigh slid between my hips and she lifted the robe I wore. The canvas of her worker's suit scraped along my bare skin and I screamed. Her powerful, honed, _working_ body lifted and bent and pinned my own to bedsheets and walls and the tile of the dingy worker's apartment.

Flesh on flesh. We were two beasts and nothing more...and yet her control of my pleasure was more total than my control of her, when she finally allowed me to meld and take her mind.

Why had we Tilsi forgotten how to make love like that?

Belatedly, I realize that I'm standing near a dissolved crys-pane while a timer is running to reform the window and start the silent alarm.

 **_A disaster lesbian_ ** **,** Claire might say. Wasting time thinking about a pretty girl.

If I can clear the outer wall, I can make it to the city. 

If I can make it to the city, I can make it to the Terran district.

If I can do that, if I can see her again…I suppose at dawn I demand asylum from the United Earth embassy.

My mother's armies will have to kill me to tear me from Claire's side. I won't let it be pretty either. No sanitized kills, with my body just switching off. No forced unconsciousness. I know for a fact that no psionic she has can match me, save Mother or Father themselves. 

My rarer breeding makes up for any advantage the soldiers have in training.

I'll make her put a blade in my guts or a plasma burn in my skull.

Make the world see her for the monster she is.

I lower myself out the window, tune the climbing gloves and drop. The gloves slow my descent, leaving a fading smear of spent nanites behind me. My landing is worse than I'd like but I'm behind the hedges. Unseen.

Three hedge mazes, a sprint through the water sculptures, and a leap over the security fence, three times longer than any psi-assisted acrobatics I've dome in training.

Hopefully, no one moved the groundskeeper's waste piles since I drew all this up.

Heavy craft lumber overhead, hauling megatons of wheat or fabric or spices. Ships that span the width of buildings and boulevards. 

I've never seen more than a shuttle or one of the house's picket fighters above my bedroom window. It's eerie, seeing all that metal silent above me. Hanging silently, held up only by those tiny little blue flames from the engines.

There's a civil services patrol in the area. Checking work papers or health codes or some boring _mush'va_ before dawn. Before the rich people have to see.

Two lightly armed city militia between me and Claire's door. I don't have the luxury of wondering if my face is being broadcast in their visors non-stop. Assume it is. Assume my mother wants me brought in. Assume that lethal force is authorized.

 **_Fear everything_ ** **,** Commander Treyla taught me. **_Conquer your most dangerous fear. Then the rest._ **

I'm shorter, smaller, and lighter than them. They're carrying mid-rance plasma lancers and mass-produced foils, and I'm carrying a duelist's foil older than this city and a bookbag. Assuming they're both combat-qualified, they know how to defend themselves psionically.

They're no match for me.

The psionics in their bloodlines are scattered and scrambled, as they are for all of the common families, mixtures and blends of the gifts the great council first discovered. Where the masses have prodigies once every ten million, we have a palette to paint from. Ten families on that council, each with slightly different psionic traits in their genetics and I have been bred to include them all.

Eons of eons of carefully arraigned marriages and gene-surgery have gone into making me what I am. A thousand generations of power hungry _vy'koshes_ named Morinsi who made sure that they were better than ordinary people so they wouldn't have to feel guilty abusing them. A thousand more who saw no reason to stop being vain or selfish just because civil rights were invented.

I call the foil to me and it slides noiselessly from my sleeve to my palm. Keeping my sleeve pulled down hides the light it gives off as I charge it.

"One," I whisper.

**_Deep breath, still your thoughts._ **

"Two."

**_Reach out, open your mind._ **

"Three."

**_Strike._ **

I leap forward, whipping my wrist sideways to extend the foil. Light bends around my outline as I lunge and gravity and electromagnetism gathers in a roiling sphere at the tip of the foil. Ordinary alloy cabling meets a wrinkle in physics riding on the tip of an atom-wide blade. I snap the cables holding the awning above them and it swings down, plowing into one soldier before she can react. Her comrade does better, bracing herself for impact.

I was already behind her, having formed a time dilation bubble just long enough to cross her field of vision unseen.

I place the tip of the foil against her cheek and will her to sleep.

She crumples.

Recalling the foil into its shell, I knock on Claire's door.

"Just a minute!" she calls out.

She opens the door and I fling my arms around her. She does the same. 

_Moons, she's built like a Relsak._

Claire's arms are warm and thick and spiced faintly by the sweat of a long day's work. She's almost my height--not too common in human women--but in every other way, she's _more._ She fills her cot and I just slither into the gaps in her body. Her tan is fading. Our sun puts out far less ultraviolet than hers, meaning that every time we made love, she was paler and I could find another few freckles. 

"Hey," she chuckles. "You okay?"

"Hey."

Her apartment is sparse. Everything is either standard-issue or from Claire's home. The only thing she bought locally were the flowers. Earth plants can't be growing unattended in Meyari's biosphere, not without more research. It would be sad to keep a houseplant in a quarantine unit, so she purchased some silkgrass and dawn's bells for her windowsill.

"Are you packed?" I ask.

"Yeah."

"Great, let's go!"

"Sit," she pleads. "Have some tea."

"Please, Claire. Before they catch us."

"I can't, Ari. I can't run away with you. My permit got yanked. I'm going home."

"What?"

_Mother did this. She bribed someone to pull her work permit._

Psionic flame crackles over my hands and face before I can control myself.

"Shh," she coos.

"Come here."

I sit beside her, arms clenched tight around myself. She scoops me up and drops me in her lap before tickling the inside of my hands to get me to unclench.

"Ari, you are gorgeous and brave and crazy and I'm pretty sure you're a witch…" she jokes, lifting my left arm to marvel at the fading wisps of heat.

"But we're _kids,_ Ari. I'm here on a student agriculture project and you're...you're…"

Claire laughs. Once. Softly. Unhappily.

"You're a space princess."

"What?" I snap.

She nods at the table.

"Letter."

Sure enough, there's a letter -- a paper letter -- on her table. Written in English and with truly awful penmanship. The only well-drawn thing on it is my father's name and seal.

"He says he learned English just to write that. Your dad sounds like a sweetheart," Claire chuckles. "Wish I could have met him before I left."

"I love you," I whine.

"I know," Claire sighs.

She leans her head against mine and I fiddle with the knobby braid on the back of her head so I can bury my fingers in her hair. Claire drags her nails across my scalp.

"Not even peach fuzz," she muses, flicking her fingertips back and forth. "Must save you time getting ready for work, not having hair."

"I can't stay here without you," I croak.

"If you want to look me up on Earth, when you're old enough to travel, I'd love to catch up. Hear about all your adventures."

"That'll be years!"

She kisses my cheek.

"And I'll want to hear all about those years."

Claire stands up and reaches for her bags. From the shadow by the window, one of our elites steps out. Her shape is nothing more than a shimmer in the air but the armor's outline is more angular and thicker. Only elites are allowed to touch it, let alone don it.

The itch on my neck must have been her presence. If I was doing my job, I would have detected, fought and killed her before she got so close to Claire.

"Maiden Morinsi," she intones, dipping into a bow.

"My mother sent you," I snarl.

The elite drops her cloak. It's Treyala herself.

"She gave the order, yes. Your father--Lord Arastel, I should say--plucked it from the roster and told me to carry it out. Said he wanted someone even-tempered."

I slide out of Claire's arms and extend the foil.

"If you're here to kill her," I warn Treyala. "I die first."

This _is_ a problem. 

Treyala is pureblood herself, albeit from a younger, less stabilized line. She was born in one of the sub-houses who owes us allegiance. Her gifts are fewer than mine but her decades of combat experience and training make her dangerous. She holds out her inactive foil and tosses it towards me. 

"I'm here to see your woman safely to the starport, Maiden, nothing more."

Claire takes hold of my hand.

"It's fine, Ari."

She sighs.

"Water the plants, babe?"

I sniffle.

"You have my word."

"Goodbye, Ari."

"Goodbye, Claire."

Claire leans down to kiss my forehead. I reach up and press my fingers to her skin. Into her mind I push every memory, every laugh, every happy thought I had with her. Now she has my memories of her to go with her own.

A paltry parting gift, but all I can offer.

"I'll be back soon, Maiden," Treyala promises.

Closing my eyes, I focus on Treyala. This way, I can track her, cloaked or not. Once I'm sure she's gone, I stuff the silkgrass and dawn's bell into my pack and close the seals on their grow-jars so they won't spill.

I take Claire's drawing kit and her portfolio and tuck it into the secret pocket of my pack.

Two unconscious guards mean two loaded weapons, enough armor modules to cobble together a good kit and plenty of spares, plus enough credit chits to get off this rock without using my family's imprint to pay for it. If I can make it to the sewers, I will have time to break down their gear into something I can use. 

If my choice of lovers embarrasses mother so much, Tiri is welcome to choose a different heir of house.

Though I would pay to see the look on the twin's faces at the ceremony to strike my name. She may get her heirs, but Mala and Heste will never forgive her for sending me away. 


	2. Reserve Power

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BACKGROUND NOTES:
> 
> The term "maru" is often appended to naval and merchant ships of Japanese origin. The name of the spirit who taught humans how to make ships is Hakudo Maru, according to Shinto religion. Literally translated, Maru is "circle" and it is often attached to ships. The first well-known example was the _Nippon Maru_ , flagship of a 16th-century imperial fleet. 
> 
> In Star Trek canon, the no-win scenario test is a simulation to rescue a ship named _Kobayashi Maru_ and Kobayashi is a common surname and Michio Kobayashi was the commander of a Japanese aircraft carrier sank in the Battle of Midway who went down with his ship. So that is one plausible -- though unconfirmed -- explanation for the naming. 
> 
> This starship is named after Nakano Takeko who was killed in the Battle of Aizu in 1868 during the modernization of Japan where she led a corp of roughly 20 female samurai as part of a larger force to resist modernization. We'll get to the reason why this colony ship is named after what is, in essence, the only female samurai we have a photograph of ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakano_Takeko ) later in the story.
> 
> SCIENCE NOTES:  
> As we usually see them even in sci-fi, holograms are not a real thing. Light needs stuff to bounce off of...not just air. Seriously. It makes as much sense to have warp drive -- actually, there are papers on how that maaaaaaybe works as math -- than to have a recording of someone who looks like Carrie Fisher projected over a little device onto an ordinary gas like air.
> 
> So that's why the ship's computer hijacked a repair drone to give her self a tangible projection surface and a way to affect the physical world.

** Deep Space  **

** Milky Way Galaxy  **

The only sight is hazy white and it hurts.

The only sound is a flat buzz.

The only sensation is agony.

The only smell is sour and sweet and makes my neck tense up.

"Kate!"

"M'not sleep, mom."

= = = = = 

Someone gleaming and silver blue and whose figure is sort of dripping is staring down at me. My head hurts. Looking up, I can see only hands and the crook of an elbow and a woman's torso. So whoever she is, my head is in her lap.

Everything stinks like that time when I was sixteen and I tried to barbecue something for my girlfriend. Mom always said I was the only cowgirl in Texas who couldn't deal with beef. The story of the reeking improperly-thawed, half-cooked, half-burnt steaks is LeGrange family legend.

"You're alive," the person above me sniffs.

"Yeah, guess I am."

I lift my hand to try and wipe my face but a firestorm of pain convinces me not to.

"Anna?"

"Yeah, Kate."

"You're holding me. But you're a computer."

There's a laugh and her lap partially dematerializes, smacking my head on the deck.

"Ow…"

Anna gathers me up into a half-sitting posture.

"Sorry!" she squeaks. "Well, let's just say that Artificial Networked Node Administration, Mark Eleven couldn't rescue my friends, so I hacked something together with projectors and a repair drone's nanites."

**_I didn't know we were friends. Cool!_ **

"I'm so glad you're alive," she whispers. "Your name is Anna now and just so you know, just between us girls...that's a nice color on you."

"Why wouldn't I be alive?"

Anna holds her hand -- well, the construct made in the image of a human hand -- in front of my face. In her palm, the ship's log files and sensor recordings are playing.

"Radiation," she murmurs. "Right as we received the skiff with the captain on it, the farther star went nova. No warning. No reason either...could not have been natural. Nothing that's stable outside a propulsion lab has that much of an effect that quickly."

I watch in Anna's palm as the hangar doors snap shut, slicing off the tail end of the skiff's engine array. The colors distort as the warp drive kicks in and the computer has to compensate for the blue shift in the cameras. Fire suppression systems douse the red-hot coils with inert carbon foam and repair bots slice the cockpit open to retrieve the captain.

"What happened?" I ask.

I think I might already know. My eyes hurt, like a bright light hit them and my skin is really itchy and I have a sinking feeling about that burnt meat smell I woke up to.

Anna shivers.

"They're all dead. The bubble from FTL protected the ship physically but anyone in range of a viewport or any other weak point took a fatal dose of beta and gamma. Once the minimum safe distance protocols unlocked, I took the helm and..."

Anna wipes holographic snot off her holographic hand. I don't think she could be faking _ugly crying_ even if she'd been programmed to _cry_ , which would imply she'd been programmed to _feel_ which is impressive. My next update to UN Command on Anna's performance will be glowing.

"We're lost, Kate. The system either overshot using the MSD preset or else the probe network detected a bunch of new no-go zones because we're nineteen thousand light-years from the nearest known habitable system. I don't have a clear flight path to any of them and we have no quantum communication systems responding. I've cached messages and pushed them to all the emitters but that deck took a beating and no one has ever tested what happens to those if they surf half a supernova shockwave while switched on...blowing up a binary star system is a bit too expensive for a shakedown cruise."

**_Jesus._ **

"Pods?"

"Accounted for and intact, all 93,103 colonists, plus all pets and ninety-two percent of viable livestock embryos. Power to run them for a very long time if I keep FTL locked out. Any support crew on lower decks has been patched up, dosed with some painkillers and euphorics and they're headed back to cryo. You should go under next, Captain."

"Captain?"

"Katherine, you're the only command-staff officer alive besides Halverson and he's in cryo. You have to go back into cryo, too. Please. I can't lose another friend today."

I lick my lips, which feel like dead leaves.

"Can I record an outgoing message?"

Anna nods.

"Go. I've already recorded the boilerplate stuff for command, so you know."

_**Thanks, Anna.** _

"This is Katherine LeGrange, Diplomatic Officer with the United Nations Colonization, Communication and Cartographic Initiative. I am hereby taking command of the _UN Nakano Maru_ following the death of Admiral Traught. This is an unarmed, civilian starship carrying families to an unoccupied planet in the rim. Any and all vessels able to render navigational assistance, please respond. Help us. Blessings to all, from all, for all."

I nod at Anna.

"Trying the old universal religion, eh?" she teases.

A fit of coughing leaves my ribs on fire and my hands flecked with blood.

"Yeah. Tilsi have had more peaceful first contacts than anybody. They're doing something right… Help me up, Anna."

"Yes, ma'am."

I wasn't ready for her impromptu body to be so strong but it makes sense and if she wasn't carrying me, I don't think I'd reach the emergency mid-deck cryo.

Anna locks me in the pod herself, as if she doesn't trust robots which she can hand count atoms with not to fat-finger this job.

"It's not your fault, Anna."

"I didn't say it was!" she protests.

_**These drugs are fun…** _

"You feel guilty," I mumble. "It's a moral thing. I'll make a real girl outta you yet…"

She seals my pod, pointing at her own ear through the glass. She even goes so far as to mouth 'I can't hear you!' slowly enough for me to make out while cotton candy fills my brain.

Asshole.

"I love you, Samri," I whisper at the inside of a metal tube.

  
  



	3. (Kelsey)  In the Name of Goddesses, Commercial Spaceflight, and Substitute Teachers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we meet one half of an OTP, we have some things to look forward to, President-wise, and high school is basically exposition in real life anyway...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GLOSSARY: 
> 
> MDSV (Merchantile Deep Space Vessel)
> 
> AUTHOR'S NOTE: 
> 
> NASA's planned moon mission (going back, that is) will be "Artemis" and be all-female. It's set to touch down in 2023. Since our story is near-future, that's current stuff.

**Kelsey Marshall**

The Human Homeworld of "Earth" (25,000 LY from Galactic Central Point)

Western Arm, Milky Way Galaxy 

Rural America

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez Academy for STEM Students

I push the classroom door open. It's a substitute teacher today, which sucks.

"You are?"

"Marshall, Kelsey," I groan.

Not because it takes a rocket scientist, so to speak. Because Ms. Jorgenson knows me and knows how celebrating Discovery Day affects me.

She usually lets me duck out and since I missed my chance to see Alicia at the bleachers before school, I was hoping to grab her while everyone else watched the video.

"Afraid this one isn't in immersive reality, kids," the substitute jokes.

The class groans. Not because the footage is two-dimensional but because it was a terrible joke.

Each and every one one of us remembers pre-IR, pre-automated flight, pre-space travel. I was eleven when the Codex was found and just over eighteen months ago, our first ship reached Alpha Centauri. 

This lady looks about a hundred and eighty, so I'm sure she just assumes we're all entitled juvenile assholes…

Watching this is like having a psychotic break. I'm watching the video but it's also memories and so fucking embarrassing I wish for one of those overdue asteroid strikes to wipe the Earth clean. 

_Former President Warren stares at the camera. God, that's a throwback!_

_Rather than the Oval Office, this was filmed at Cape Canaveral._

_"My fellow Americans," she begins. "What we celebrate today is so enormous, a national holiday seems small. But we use the tools we have. As of eight fifty-two this morning, humanity has been blessed to experience peaceful first contact. Less than an hour ago, in the United Nations, I was in the audience as three civilizations revealed themselves to us: the Tilsi Federation, the Unified Reslak State, and the Umran Synod."_

_Beside her stand the ambassadors. When the camera's zoom, it displays their titles._

_Resle Kahiiani, Tilsi Federation, Ambassador to Humanity. A man who looks like someone took an underwear model and stretched him, adding a foot and a half to his height and slimming him but leaving the hard jawline, golden skin and simmering brown eyes. Not a single hair on his head._

_Kho Talashe, Unified Reslask State. A compact woman with a shock of pale grey hair, a sleeveless robe and biceps that dance and her sweat all but sparkles in the Florida sun. I've seen this video a dozen times, each time burning with embarrassment but the way her torso flexes when she leans close to whisper something to the Secret Service lady it still snags my attention, every time._

_The agent catches a giggle in her hand. A hot, momentary flutter crawls down my spine._

_Either of their species could pass for human, though a crowd of them would be suspicious. No woman under six and half of them scraping seven feet. Every single person smooth-skinned, hairless, and ranging from whipped cream to golden color? A crowd of people built like draft horses, all rippling muscle and sturdy skeletons?_

_Closest to Warren is the strangest. The Umran ambassador. Tah-Oha was her name. Short and wide-framed and furry and with an enlongated and velvety face, she looks like a bobcat in gold reading glasses. Her equally furry hands are holding a cane and when she shakes, she extends her claws to keep a grip. She was a legend back home, ancient even by their standards. Humanity was a quiet posting for her before retirement. She died in a takeoff accident the next year._

_"So, today, we thank the brave men and women who took humanity's first steps towards this moment."_

_"We also thank one man, one man in particular, who showed us what could be possible. He took great personal risk and displayed the highest form of selflessness in donating his work to the public domain. He is here with his wife and his daughter today."_

_"James Marshall, please come to the stage."_

  
  


Lacking any other way out, I smack myself with my textbook to knock myself out.

\-----

  
**James Marshall (Six years earlier)**

800,000 km from the Moon, 1.2 million km from Earth 

11 days under burn-and-drift flight plan filed with the UN Space Traffic Control 

66 hours return voyage at maximum theoretical speed (18,200 km/hour) 

...fuel reserves exist for only 5 hours continuous burn 

...the human body can survive 180 seconds at that G force. 

  
  


The Who's _Meet the New Boss_ is blasting out of the speakers and I'm drumming my fingers on the console. I picked over sixteen rocks no one thought were worth much, found five winners and put a quarter-trillion of rare minerals in the hold. Enough of the stuff to make cell phone components until my grandkids are old.

The bonus on this job ought to be at least $6,000.

I may have made it back late for Kelsey's birthday but I got her a souvenir from space, just like she asked. I won't tell her about the lump of palladium and iridium dust I snagged before it could be weighed. My job as her father to be ready for her college education.

**_Weird ass thing._ **

It sits in the unoccupied co-pilot's seat. I'm not sure if a hovering sphere of liquid whatever it is can be watching me, but I think it is. Every so often, a gleaming, metal-looking probe shoots out and taps at the control panel or pokes my cheek.

It shoots out a cylindrical appendage and turns off my music.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday. Any craft in the area, this is Artemis 8. Hull breach blew out two-thirds of our atmo and all our fuel. We are adrift. Please respond."

**_Shit._ **

"Dot?" I ask the computer.

"Negative, Jimmy Boy. It would take us too long to reach them. The Artemis 8 has an eleven person crew. Assuming human females aged 20 to 50 of median height, weight and a high degree of physical fitness, they will consume all oxygen in the craft in three hours."

"You got any bright ideas?" I ask the floating ball of weird. "It isn't right, leaving them to die. My daughter will never forgive me."

The entire surface ripples and then it just pops _,_ scattering grains of sand everywhere and leaving a jet black core behind the size of a baseball..

My grimy, fast-food-wrapper-littered console is clean. Where buttons and switches had been, touch screen controls sit under gleaming glass panels. What looks like fiber optic cables hang around my head like a curtain, with information projected on all sides. When I turn my head, the projection changes. Vitals like fuel, positioning, speed, systems follow the edges of my vision and when I look over my shoulder, I can see into the deadspot between the lifting crane and the forward thrusters. The ship never had a camera there before.

Metal plates are clicking together like puzzle pieces, covering the viewscreen.

I hear the spaceframe whine as presumably, whatever is upgrading the cockpit is working on it as well

Then something slams me back against the seat. In the fancy new heads-up, I watch my speed climb, climb, climb, faster than anyone has ever traveled. I'm already beating the record of NASA's nine-second fusion rocket test. The gees fade and I look at the ship's status. We're still moving. We're still accelerating. I should still have a gorilla on my chest, eight times normal gravity. The fact that I don't feel a thing makes my new friend's trick all the more impressive. 

Little by little, the silvery liquid seeps out of the control panel and the bulkheads and wriggles back home to wrap around the ball.

"Whoa."

A hand-like thing comes out of the sphere and gives me a thumbs up.

"Dot?"

"Yes, sir?"

**_Holy shit._ **

If I weren't already married, I would have just proposed to Dot so I could listen to her voice every day.

"Can we make it now?"

"Yes."

I high-five the sphere, which means I get my hand stuck halfway into a ball of space magic that feels like rubbery goop.

I tune the radio.

"Artemis 8, this is commercial vessel _MDSV Yukon_ with Fermi Incorporated. James Marshall, pilot. It's a mining ship. I am venting the hold now so we will have space for all aboard. Stand by for intercept in..."

"Dot?"

She puts a timer up.

"Forty-three minutes."

"This is Lt. Colonel Tapping. Say again, Yukon? We do not have you on radar. You are not in range."

"I'm on my way. I'll make it in time. As for venting the hold, Mr. Musk will just have to kiss my ass."

The woman on the other end barks in laughter.

"I'll get our wounded ready to move. God bless."

\-----

  
  
**Kelsey Marshall  
**

The Human Homeworld of "Earth" (25,000 LY from Galactic Central Point)

Western Arm, Milky Way Galaxy 

Rural America

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez Academy for STEM Students

  
  


I put my hand up to keep the sun out of my eyes.

Alicia waves from the middle of her knot of friends. If it weren't for an entire basketball team in my way, we could see if this counterfeit key to the basement janitor's closet works...

 _ **Another day,**_ I remind myself.

A beat-up red Ford is in the handicap stall, crooked as all hell. The driver is mashing the horn. He didn't even bother moving the cheap whiskey out of the cup-holder.

"Fuck."

Dad was picking me up today. I don't know why mom bothers accommodating anything. I know she still has feelings for him but she's no idiot. Idiots don't wake their thirteen-year-old daughter in the night with grandpa's Colt forty-five in one hand, a black eye and a pair of suitcases.

 _ **We're going somewhere better,**_ she said.

Far as I know, it was the first time he hit her. She knew the statistics, so she made it the last time. 

I get my brains from both sides.

Steve puts his big, clumsy hand on my shoulder. He nods towards me, then towards my dad's car, then back to me.

 ** _If you need me,_** is what he means.

"Haven't seen you since spring," I tease. "See you got that growth spurt."

"Uh-huh. See you got that gay spurt. Your coming out video was real sweet...but are you the reason we lost last night? Team captain with a broken heart? I mean, it's probably the boy's teams only shot at getting any attention."

"Fuck, no. Ally-cat was in a good mood when I left her."

"TMI, Kels. TMI."

"See you!" I call out.

"Button!" he replies, tossing me one.

It reads: _Re-elect AOC, 2032_ and contains a looped video of waving, beaming woman sitting in front of the Resolute Desk.


	4. She did what she had to.  (Kelsey)

_ The Human Homeworld of "Earth" (25,000 LY from Galactic Central Point) _

_ Western Arm, Milky Way Galaxy _

_ Rural America _

With my dad towering behind me, I reach with trembling fingers into the safe in my closet.

"Hurry up!" my dad snarls.

"Leave her be, James," my mother groans.

"It's mine!" he shrieks.

_ No. _

I finish punching in the code but I don't open it.

"No, it's not. It's not yours, dad."

"What did you say?"

"You gave it to me, remember? I was fourteen. The government had just released it to us after it wouldn't download anymore. It was Valentine's Day and Madison had just outed me to the whole school. You were still--still you--back then, so you wanted to cheer me up."

He puts his foot on my back and shoves me down, grinding my face into the carpet. Drunk asshole is standing on my back now, trying to pry my hands off the latch.

**_I miss my dad._ **

This sucks because this is my dad but I still miss him. I miss the guy who taught me to hang on hard to important things. The guy who introduced me to grandpa Larry and Beatrice and made Larry tell me stories about working on Apollo 16 as a young man. Who made sure that Beatrice nagged until Larry taught me how to protect myself.

**_"So you can protect your lady,"_ ** Beatrice had teased.

"It's not yours, dad," I croak.

There's not enough air in me to shout.

"Do you have any idea how much it's worth?" he snaps. "You don't even use it."

"It still talks to me sometimes."

"What?"

He grabs me and yanks me up, not moving both feet off my back first. It hurts. Bad. 

"You're hurting her, Jim!"

"Shut up!"

I hear the blow my mother receives, but I can't see it.

Click!

I know that click. It's the safety on an Army-issue Colt 1911 sidearm. Grandpa Larry was handed one when he became 2nd Lt. Larry Marshall and when all of Vietnam was going to hell around them during the evac, no one remembered to ask for it back, so he kept it.

I don't know exactly how mom got it but I sometimes think we're only alive because she did. Because the night dad came home drunk enough and broken enough to hit her, she made it to the gun safe, grabbed it and loaded it quicker than he could peel himself off the floor.

"Get...away...from…her," my mom huffs. "Now."

"You'd shoot your husband in cold blood?"

"I'd shoot a hundred husbands. Any mother would when a child is danger."

"Crazy bitch, they'll give you the chair."

"Lethal injection," I remind him.

He grinds his foot on my forearm.

**_Why does my brain feel the need to irritate men at all times?_ **

"Fuck off."

"If they do, Kelsey's still safe," my mother replies.

"Leave. Now."

"Oh no," dad laughs. "I got rent due and since finding that piece of shit, I can't get a job."

"Really more Elon Musk's fault," I grumble. "Than it is mine."

"You're coming with me," he decides, pulling on my injured arm to bring me up to face level. "If you can talk to that, maybe you're worth something after all."

His breath is like sniffing a tailpipe. From this angle, I can see the beat-up revolver in his back pocket. 

"Out of my way, Sharon."

**_Fuck._ **

"He's got a gun, mom!"

"Jim," mom begins, a lot softer than before. "Think. You have a restraining order. They find you with that gun, you won't be coming out for a long time."

He pulls the gun out and laughs.

"They won't catch me. C'mon, kid."

Mom's eyes flick from Dad's gun, to me, to the charger she usually keeps her phone on.

"It's fine, ma," I tell her. "I'll manage."

She plants herself in the doorway. Unlike mom, I took formal self-defense classes so I know that pissing him off further is a bad idea.

"Move. I'm leaving."

"Not with my baby, you won't."

He raises the gun towards her.

"Fuck's sake, ma, drop it."

Finally, she does.

She kicks the gun past him, between his legs. 

Well, now's my chance.

Using my one good arm and my teeth, I take a chunk out of his ear and hold his gun arm away. He pulls the trigger, probably on instinct. 

**One. Two.**

Cursing and yelling, he throws me into the corner of the room. Right next to the Colt.

Three things happen at the same time.

Mom swings a lamp at him, cracking it over his head.

He puts the gun to her ear.

I come up with the Colt in my hands and fire.

=====

There's a woman talking to me. She's wearing a crummy suit and she has a paper coffee cup in her hands. The ambulance left. They took mom first, at least. Dad ought to rot where he fell but I suppose that's illegal in most states.

"Kelsey, honey, can you hear me?"

**_Mom's dead. My fault. Mom's dead. My fault. Momsdeadmyfaultmyfaultmyfaultmyfault._ **

"Move," I croak.

I vomit onto the grass.

"Shh," she tells me, rubbing my back.

"You're a cop?" I ask.

"Yeah. But don't worry about that right now. Are you hurt?"

"Sprained my shoulder, I think."

"Okay, honey. Let's see if someone can look at that."

My hands smell like gunpowder, blood and puke.

=====

There's a guy talking to the detective lady outside the interrogation room. I can hear pretty well because unlike in the movies, this building is utter shit and the door didn't fully latch.

"The hell you will!"

"She killed a man."

"She defended herself and her mom."

"Not your call."

"You rat-dicked fucker, you're pushing this as murder, aren't you?"

"None of your concern, detective."

The door swings open. It's the man in the suit, not the detective lady. He holds a sheet of paper out to me.

"Sign this."

"What is it?"

"Your statement."

"I'm going to read it first."

"Were you lying before?"

"I'm having a bad day. I might have missed something."

I read it three times.

"Couple corrections," I murmur. "Dad's gun had no serial number on it. All scratched off. Mom had a permit for the Colt. You can't take the Codex into evidence. Federal law. And there was a restraining order. We renewed it last week."

"I won't sign this until those corrections are made and I have an adult."

His lip twitches.

"My next of kin is Larry Marshall. He lives in Seattle. You'll need my guardian for that to be binding anyway."

The detective lady is crying.

"I heard something about you being a rat-dicked fucker, so you might want my legal guardian present. Do everything by the book and all."

I lean over, vomit into the trash can and refuse to look at him any more.

=====    
  


The detective lady is hugging me.

"Is this your job, to hug criminals?"

She sighs.

"My job isn't just about criminals. It's about keeping people safe. You tried to do that tonight. I had to do what you did, once, during a standoff. At a bank, not with my mom. It didn't go any better for me."

She squeezes me close.

"You know, your statement caught three things my uniform guys missed at the scene. Ten years, you could be a hell of a cop."


End file.
